Easter

Last April I went to Porto Novo, the capital, to spend Easter with my old host family from training. The trip involves first going to Cotonou, the largest city in the country, and then heading east for an hour or two.

After ten hours of frequently interrupted motion southward in four separate bush taxis, I got to the outskirts of Cotonou, suspiciously regarding the black line of clouds to the southeast. We unloaded passengers at various points outside the city in a light rain and then we hit a wall of water. Through the deluge and the fogged windows I saw that we were passing through Étoile Rouge, a massive roundabout and the main taxi terminal in the city.

“Where are we going?”

“Where are you going?” said the driver.

“Porto Novo.”

“We’re going under the bridge. Lots of taxis to Porto Novo there. No problem finding a taxi to Porto Novo.”

Lies, I thought.

We stopped in an asphalt lot next to the escarpment of the bridge that goes over the lagoon to the other side of Cotonou and eventually to Porto Novo. The place was deserted except for a few apparently empty cars. The driver turned off the engine and commenced to sit in silence.

“What are we waiting for?” I ventured.

“It’s raining.”

“Yes. It is raining.”

“Yes. You see.”

We sat some more.

“Are there taxis to Porto Novo?”

“There’s one right there.” He indicated a Peugeot in front of us. I pulled out my poncho and waded over. It was, on closer inspection, tightly packed with humanity. I tapped on the window and it opened a half inch.

“What do you want!” someone shouted over the din of the Biblical deluge.

“Is this taxi going to Porto Novo!”

“Yes!”

“Where’s the driver!”

“Over there!”

I looked hopelessly around the empty lot. “Over there where!”

He pointed to a shack about fifty yards away.

I went back to my taxi to get another passenger who was also going to Porto Novo and we waded to the shack.

“I’m leaving right now” said the driver, reclining in his chair and taking a drag on his cigarette. “Go put your stuff in the trunk and we’ll go.”

This we did. Fifteen minutes later I went back to the shack.

“I’m not leaving until tomorrow,” quoth he.

Back to my first taxi, where my fellow traveller had taken refuge.

“When’s he leaving?” he asked.

“That driver is insane. We’ll have to go on the bridge and find something.”

We returned to the madman’s car to get our bags and found the trunk locked. Back to the shack.

“Why’d you put your stuff in my car if you want to leave today?”

We began predicting various dire consequences for his physical well-being, and he the same for us, and in the midst of all the screaming and fist-waving I stole his keys. When we left with our bags, the same mass of people were still in his car, waiting. Waiting for what? –When I understand that, I’ll understand Africa.

Up the side of the bridge we went, up an obnoxiously smooth 45-degree concrete slope, grappling on to a chainlink fence with the wind pushing waves of water and periodically throwing us flat against the fence. It was the heaviest downpour I’ve seen in Africa, and hopefully the heaviest I will ever see. Despite it, traffic ran heavily over the bridge. I sat on my helmet with my poncho draped over me and glared across the river at the ninth circle of hell, Cotonou.

A 20-seat van picked me up. At the customs station between Cotonou and Porto Novo, the driver managed to pull into the wrong land twice and collide with three separate barriers, infuriating the people with the guns and resulting in half an hour of negotiations with various customs agents and gendarmes and the payment of an epic sum in bribes.

Five minutes later we let off a passenger who held on to the sliding side door as the driver hit the gas, so that the van and the door parted ways. The driver beat the living shit out of this guy and then attempted to reattach the door using nothing but a crowbar while the rain washed over us from the hole where the door had been.

Finally we reached the causeway that goes across the lake and into Porto Novo. On the opposite shore was the new headquarters of the Assemblée Nationale, Benin’s Congress, about as far along in its construction as it was seven months ago.

I got out to flag down a moto-taxi. Motorcycles kept blowing past me, the drivers honking and shouting furiously. I realized I was standing in the middle of the street. Too much time in the bush.

A driver pulled over. I gave him the name of my host family’s quartier, Gbezounkpa, one of the poorest in the city. He looked me over, at a loss as to why a white person should want to visit this place.

“Do you…know…have you…been there before?”

I said I had.

We took off through the city that for two months was all I knew of Benin. Being back was like a dream. The wide cobblestone boulevards lined with hold-in-the-wall bars and boutiques, the old colonial buildings with their uniform peeling yellow paint and narrow balconies and fading wooden shutters. It all seemed big and exciting and luxurious.

The street where he let me off was all mud and rocks, shacks, dirt alleys, buildings half-finished because the money ran out. Nine months ago this was the strangest place in the world to me. Now it was familiar, comforting even. I had arrived.

I opened the compound gate. Charging at me across the yard came Honora, the little boy who could barely walk when I lived here. Little kids usually haven’t yet started learning French, but with Honora I discovered that they are all fluent in the language of funny faces. Here he came, charging across the yard, showing off all kids of faces he’d thought up in the past seven months.

The salon was full of guests whom I’d never seen before. My host dad put in front of me a plate of crackers — expensive, from a boutique — and a beer. Beer bottles here are twice as big as in America.

“Do you want to split the beer?” I said.

“No, you look like you need the whole thing.”

The guests were but a small sampling of host dad’s siblings. Their father, it turns out, had thirty children. “One is dead now, though,” noted one of the brothers. “Now there are only twenty-nine of us left.”

This brother was sporting Dockers, suede loafers, and an argyle sweater. I asked him where he lived.

“France.”

“Oh. What are you doing in France?”

He gave me some highly technical explanation of his job, which I have completely forgotten.

“And how do you like the French?”

He regarded me for a moment.

“Have you ever visited an anglophone West African country?”

“No,” I said.

“They are much more developed than countries such as Benin.”

“You mean former French colonies.”

“Yes.”

He stared at me.

“So, it’s the French,” I offered.

He smiled. “I just wanted to see if you hate the French as much as we do.”

I decided not to disabuse him of this notion, and he went on to enumerate various opinions about people of the Gallic persuasion.

The adults of the family were about the same as I remembered them. Host mom wasted no time in getting to her favorite topic.

“Do you eat well in Kemon?”

“Yes, mom.”

“You lie!” She poked my ribs violently. “Look at you! You are starving out there! Holy mother of God! When you go back to America, what will your parents say? That the people of Benin starved you!”

Mémé, the grandmother of the family, speaks very little French. Her only language is Gún, the language of the dominant tribe in Porto Novo. Because I’ve learned a tiny little bit of Nagot, which is a tiny little bit related to Gún, she is now convinced that I am fluent in Gún.

“Blah blah blah blah,” she says.

“Uh…uh…fine, thanks.”

“Ah-HUH! Blah blah blah blah.”

“Uh…it goes well.”

“Ah-HUH! Blah blah blah blah blah.”

The two kids I knew the best, Tobie (a seven-year-old girl) and Oniséfour (a ten-year-old boy), had each grown about a foot. Tobie had also grown even more outgoing and more weird, talking my ear off about seemingly unconnected topics, stopping periodically to stare intently at me as if I’d just got off the spaceship from Tralfamadore. Oniséfour intervened with one of the most excellent statements I have ever heard.

“Faut la laisser. Elle bavarde trop. C’est pas bon! N’encouragez pas cette maladie.” (Ignore her. She chatters too much. It’s not good! Don’t encourage this illness.)

Oniséfour showed me about two dozen rabbits that the family now kept, in addition to the pigs and chickens they had before.

“They are cute,” he noted. “Especially the little ones. We are going to kill four for Easter.”

Irony alert.

“But they’re so cute,” I said.

“Yes. But they are also delicious.”

They were, by the way. It was a vast improvement over the bush rat meat which I normally have the pleasure of masticating.

During my stay Honora, the little boy who likes funny faces, developed a stye that entirely closed his right eye. It Kemon I’d seen a child who lost an eye to an ameteur attempt to lance a stye, so I thought I’d ask.

“You know, in my village, they cut those,” I said to host dad.

“They cut them? With what?”

“With a knife.”

“Jesus! You can gouge out the eye like that!”

When I first lived here, fresh from America, the place and daily life seemed impossibly poor, impossibly primitive. With some justification — I had one of the poorest host families in one of the poorest quartiers of the city. But the village changed my perception of wealth and luxury. Now the house, the quartier, the city were the easy life. When the sun went down the lights came on. And the boutiques and the stalls selling street meat and baguettes and smoked fish at all hours of day and night — you could just walk out to the street, and food was there! No wandering around the village and finding only a few onions, pasta, and maybe some tomatoes or cheese.

It felt foreign, in that way, in the opposite way of how it had been before. And the family still regarded me as a new arrival from a foreign land, only now from a different foreign land. When I told them about the village there was a condescending amusement in their reaction but also an anxious assertion — we are Africans, but we are not villagers, not people of the bush, with their mud huts, their insularity, their magic, their superstition. We are people of the world.

But my initial reaction to the poverty here — and ultimately the difference between city and village is only the difference between poor and poorer — came back on Easter. You never saw kids so excited. There were no colored eggs, no baskets, no candy. What made the day special for them was that they got to eat meat.

—–

The dry season enters its seventh month. It refuses to end. In the evening girls haul water up from the large communal wells, tying rags together to lengthen the rope and reach down to the retreating water. I sit on my ass with the other men, ass-sitting being a primary occupation of males in this country, and watch them going and coming and contemplate what black magic allows a spindly 12-year-old girl to bear a crushing load of water on her head over long distances.

Equally mystifying, how they manage to stay in school when every moment of their free time they’re carrying water or firewood, or cooking or sweeping or cleaning or selling tomatoes or taking care of the little kids or doing any of the other tasks which anybody with a penis is clearly incapable of doing. The best student in one of my classes, Christianne, lives near my house. She spends each evening transporting enough water to fill an Olympic pool and is up before dawn doing grunt work. When does she study? How does she stay awake in class?

One afternoon, the large buckets of water kept in my school’s office for the benefit of thirsty teachers ran out. The principal came into my class.

“After school, all the girls must bring water from the village!”

This would involve carrying it a mile uphill in the heat of the day.

“What about the boys?” I said.

A patronizing smile. “The boys have to study.”